Google to Bing: Stop copying our search data

Google is waggling a finger at Microsoft’s Bing, saying the new search engine on the block is copying its users’ search patterns.

Microsoft is responding with shrug and a slightly-defensive, “So?”

The issue was originally reported by Search Engine Land. But the controversy spread like wildfire after a confrontation between Google’s Matt Cutts and Bing’s Harry Shum during a panel at the Big Think Farsight conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.

The Los Angeles Times reports Cutts said Bing used Google search data to improve its own results, and Shum responded that Bing is using data that are publicly available.

We woke up to an interesting (and interestingly timed) article by Danny Sullivan about some complaints Google has about how it says Bing ranks results. I wanted to take a moment to make a couple of points in advance of this panel so we can stay focused on the original intent of the Summit.

The Bing engineering team has been working hard over the past couple of years to deliver the best search relevance and quality in the industry and for our users. This is our top priority every day.

We use over 1,000 different signals and features in our ranking algorithm. A small piece of that is clickstream data we get from some of our customers, who opt-in to sharing anonymous data as they navigate the web in order to help us improve the experience for all users.

To be clear, we learn from all of our customers. What we saw in today’s story was a spy-novelesque stunt to generate extreme outliers in tail query ranking. It was a creative tactic by a competitor, and we’ll take it as a back-handed compliment. But it doesn’t accurately portray how we use opt-in customer data as one of many inputs to help improve our user experience.

The history of the web and the improvement of a broad array of consumer and business experiences is actually the story of collective intelligence, from sharing HTML documents to hypertext links to click data and beyond. Many companies across the Internet use this collective intelligence to make their products better every day.